Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [42]
A sample of her writing style that would have stoked Dr. Wynn’s ire was “Going to the Dogs,” the first of a number of satires she published in the Corinthian. The parody appeared in the fall 1942 issue, with its black-and-white cover photograph of a thoughtful Jessie penning a “Dear Soldier” letter while lying on the campus lawn. “A few days later I was further startled by seeing another group of students chase a cat up a tree on the front campus,” complains her narrator, reminiscent of the myopic groom of Poe’s “The Spectacles,” as she mistakes roving dogs for college students. She signed this effort “M. F. O’Connor,” a half step to “Flannery O’Connor.” Tenderly echoed in the neutral signature, too, were the initials used by her father, “E. F. O’Connor.”
By the middle of the fall semester, Mary Flannery clicked into a congenial role for herself in the GSCW community: campus cartoonist. As she simply “moved over” from Peabody High to Georgia State, she likewise “moved over” as a cartoonist. The faculty adviser to the Colonnade was the same journalism instructor, George Haslam, who had invited her to contribute to the Palladium. Together they agreed that she would raise her rate of production to a cartoon every week and take over as art editor, beginning in November, in the newspaper offices in the basement of Parks Hall. She quickly adopted the campus as the setting for her cartoons, signified by a Greek column or a stone pediment. But instead of aligning herself with the idealistic view of Betty Boyd’s first-impressions piece, O’Connor fixed her gaze on its eyesores: packs of stray dogs; boards patching holes in the muddy lawn; glaring nighttime spotlights.
As with her first published college story, O’Connor marked her new artistic venue with a new signature, a monogram. Such monograms, formed by turning initials, or the letters of a name, into heraldic pictures, representing a person or a job, and used on stationery, handkerchiefs, and business cards, were a wartime fad; they were even highlighted in the popular Paramount Pictures “Unusual Occupations” series of ten-minute color newsreels, in a 1944 segment titled “‘What’s in a Name’ Monogram Art.” For her own identifying emblem, she mined her dearest obsession, scrambling her initials to make a design suggesting a bird: “M” for a beak; “F,” a tail; “O,” a face; “C,” the curve of a body. “It may look like a bird,” Betty Boyd Love wrote of the witty final result, “but I’m sure she would have said it was a chicken.”
O’Connor’s debut cartoon appeared on October 6, with her chicken logo fixed in the lower-left corner. Titled “The Immediate Results of Physical Fitness Day,” its subject was a spent girl in baggy sweater, skirt, and saddle oxfords, stiffly supporting herself with a cane, her tongue hanging out. The illustration accompanied a feature story: “Keeping Fit: Physical Fitness Program to Be Daily Feature at GSCW.” Over the next months, she concocted an unfolding frieze of such challenged types — some, like a harried, limp-haired girl, staggering under a load of books, an obvious self-portrait. “I thought of her then as a cartoonist who also tried her hand at writing,” says Gertrude Ehrlich, an Austrian “refugee student.” “She was a genius at depicting us ‘Jessies’ running around campus, with scarves hanging out of pockets, or messily draped on our heads.”
By the time O’Connor completed her eight cartoons of the first fall quarter, she had developed her favorite situation — a short, fat girl and her tall, thin sidekick, bouncing caustic remarks off each other. In an October 24 spoof of a faculty-student softball game, one of the pair of girls,